The Future Eaters: A First Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and Peoples
By Dr. Tim Flannery
Reed Books, 1994. 421 pp. with illustrations, maps, references, $29.95
Reviewed by Connie Frazer
Forget the petty tales of kings and dictators. This is history on the grand scale — from ancient Gondwanaland and the later great islands of Meganesia and Tasmantis, all drifting about the globe, their slow movements powered by the hot currents from its molten core, down to the present day.
The book is a treasury of astonishing facts. Just to whet your appetite — chicken-sized dinosaurs with feathers surviving three months of total darkness each year. I was fascinated to learn the origin of the "bogy man" used to scare children into good behaviour and to have settled in my mind finally the old argument of what makes us human — the ability of our food to go down the wrong way, sometimes choking us to death, a risk not shared by other mammals, which gave us the ability to invent language. Babies at two years old repeat this evolutionary change, which must explain the sheer delight they take in playing for hours with the new sounds they find they can make.
While agriculture was a mere glimmer on the south-western horizon for Europe, ancient New Guineans were already feeding themselves from well-made gardens, and along the coasts of southern Asia the rich waters were fished for the first time during hot daylight hours by humans who evolved very black skin for sun protection.
This enabled them to use the first seagoing craft. And so began the arrival of the first settlers in new lands — deceptively rich lands with animals that failed to recognise us as predators because we still had the smell of our mainly vegetarian primate ancestors. These were the first future-eaters, consuming the limited resources, eating the future of their children.
This is what the final part of the book is about: how the first Australians got wise and adapted to their environment, looking after the land with "firestick farming" and story places and amazing social networks across vast distances.
We modern settlers are the latest future eaters; indeed, future eating has become worldwide. We must realise the "strangeness" of our country, with no natural predictable annual seasons (as Europe, for instance) but the harsh climatic change of El Niño, which gives us enormous droughts and floods.
Unfortunately, the author perpetuates the prevailing view that all our troubles are due solely to population and urbanisation, while ignoring the fatal compelling growth imperative of the capitalist system. Nevertheless, the book is a magnificent attempt to understand ourselves and our environment, and deserves a place on all our bookshelves.